1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an evaluation support apparatus that uses CAD (Computer Aided Design) data containing part names and the amounts or numbers of parts for each product to evaluate the recyclability or environmental load of the product.
2. Description of the Related Art
The evaluation apparatus that evaluates environmental loads in recyclability and life cycle of products is mainly directed to support selection of parts and materials for manufacture of products with improvement of recyclability of products.
To evaluate the recyclability and environmental load of products, kinds of materials forming the part or mass of the materials of the parts is input for each of parts constructing the product. The recycling rate on the product and quantity of the environment load causing in the whole life cycle are computed based on the input parameters.
However, even if the recycling rate on the product and the quantity of the environmental load are computed by this evaluation apparatus, it is unclear what obstructs recycling or what deteriorates environment load. If the evaluation result of recyclability on the product and environmental load are not reflected by part/material selection, the evaluation in itself becomes meaningless.
It is an object of evaluation to support selection of part/materials in a design stage. Therefore, for the purpose of attaining this object the evaluation result of recyclability and environmental load on the product is provided for a user. The user is required to grasp that where of the product is a problem with respect to the recyclability and environmental load and how it is to be improved.
Conventionally, a CAD (Computer aided design) unit is used in the stage of a product design. CAD data generated by this CAD unit includes information that indicates parts composing the product, the quantity of parts, the number of parts, the shape of each parts, etc. Using the CAD data for evaluation of environmental load in the recyclability and life cycle of the product reduces workload for data input and is very useful for performing the evaluation in efficiency.
What obstructs recyclability and what deteriorates the environmental load are analyzed based on recyclability on a product and an evaluation result of environmental load. If it is possible to take a support for improving them, it may attain the recyclability/environment load evaluation to make CAD data reflect an improvement result.
Conventionally, even if an evaluation result of a recyclability of a product and an environmental load of the product are provided in a design stage of the product, it is difficult to analyze an obstruction factor of the recyclability and an aggravation factor of the environmental based on the evaluation result and take a remedy directly associated with the obstruction factor of recyclability and the aggravation factor of environmental load directly.
Therefore, there is a problem not to be able to make selection of parts and materials composing a product reflect an evaluation result of recyclability of a product and an environmental load easily.